Impeachment and Debushification

This past weekend Rep. Dennis Kucinich, with the help of people like Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan ramped up his efforts to oust the Bush-Cheney regime by announcing legislation aimed at impeaching Cheney first.

Republicans heaped abuse on Kucinich's efforts, and most Democrats, afraid of being accused of collusion with enemy or some such thing, ignored them.

The Bush-Cheney regime will certainly be impeached -- in fact is in the process of being impeached, convicted, and run out of town -- but not in the United States. The young Shi'ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, now easily the most powerful politial figure in Iraq, has had a letter read in parliament which calls Bush the evil one.

Professor Juan Cole explains: "In Islamic lore the Mahdi or promised one will return at the end of time to restore the world to justice. He will be opposed by an evil one-eyed figure, the Dajjal, which is usually translated the 'anti-Christ' by analogy with apocalyptic Christian beliefs. Muqtada called Bush the Dajjal."

Al-Sadr's letter was read aloud in the Iraqi parliament by Liqa' Al-Yasin, a female MP and member of Moktada's bloc of legislators. It says in part "While you once predicted that your picture would hang in Iraqis' homes, now it is under their feet...You have destroyed the reputation of the West among Easterners generally." Moktada also accused Bush the Dajjal of, among other things, desecrating the Koran.

If Bush wasn't such a pathological liar, and if he believed one word of what he says about democracy, he would be backing the formation of a unity government under Moktada al-Sadr, the only politician in Iraq who might be capable of somewhat uniting the ethnicities, sects, tribes, and factions, or at least convincing them to bury their various hatchets.

But he doesn't believe his own lies. And he lies through his teeth, like the Dajjal he is.

I would strongly recommend following Professor Cole's daily coverage of these events to anybody on this board who's interested in these matters, which seems to be most of us.

Speech Suppression, Corporate Monopoly Style

The Postal Regulatory Commission is in the process of setting new periodicals mailing rates that threaten to put many small publications with limited resources out of business.

The new rates will impose a life-threatening strain on political publications of both the left and right, such as The Progressive, In These Times, and The National Review. These are the kinds of political advocacy magazines that target niche readerships and carry limited, inexpensive advertising.

At the same time, the new rates will favor mass-circulation, advertising-heavy magazines such as People and TV Guide.

The Postal Regulatory Commission is adopting the new rate plan at the behest of corporate giant Time-Warner, which is now engaged in a naked attempt to drive smaller competition out of the market and establish a monopoly on information in the U.S., as well as extending its overseas influence.

This was the most important story of the week of April 15-21, but it was buried by the electronic media's monotonic coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

End Run Around the First Amendment

A necessary periodicals postal rate hike has been coming for a long time. But earlier this year, the regulatory commission rejected a proposal from its own U.S. Postal Service which would have imposed an across-the-board rates raise of 11 percent plus change for everybody.

That plan was in keeping with the 215-year history of egalitarian postal rates in this country, envisioned by Madison and Jefferson as a means to promote democracy by encouraging the free flow of information and opinion, even unpopular information and opinion.

But the political appointees of the Bush regime now occupying the Postal Regulatory Commission chose instead to secretly adopt the scheme put forward by Time-Warner, according to University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney, quoted at the conservative website World Net Daily:

"Postal policy converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

"What the Post Office now proposes goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than big magazines– as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent."

What the Postal Regulatory Commission has done, McChesney goes on to explain, is to adopt a rate schedule, secretly, in the dead of night, with no congressional supervision or oversight, giving the best prices to the biggest publishers, allowing them to lock in their market position, eliminate all smaller competition, and cement their monopoly over the information sector.

The new rates will go into effect on July 15 of this year unless this juggernaut is stopped. And it needs to be.

Monopoly Capitalism in One Country, and the Suppression of Speech

The Time-Warner plan is a perfect example of speech suppression and thought control in a sophisticated and seemingly "free and open" society such as the United States. In April of this year, Noam Chomsky wrote of this sort of speech suppression and mind control: "In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe."

It would be "crude and brutal" indeed to simply arrest the publishers and editors of left-wing and right-wing publications and throw them in jail. But the sophisticated technique of hitting them in the wallet, thus eliminating them from marketplace of ideas and leaving room for nothing but conventional thought, is the perfectly tailored technique of our friendly, eminently reasonable, back-slapping and smiling version of the thought police.

This isn't speech suppression, they'll tell you, it's just how the market works. And "the market," as we all know, is a non-ideological, perfectly objective force, which just coincidentally works to eliminate all but the most timid and conventional forms of speech and thought.

Why It's Not Going to Work

In 1520 the Vatican rounded up all the copies of Luther's "95 Theses" they could find and burned them in St. Peter's Square. They thought they had eliminated the heretical threat.

Too bad for them. The printing press had already been invented, and despite the Cardinals' best efforts, the new technology rendered their feeble attempt at old-fashioned speech and thought suppression impotent.

In a similar fashion, even if this disastrous postal rate change goes into effect in July and many smaller publications are put out of business, they won't stop publishing. Largely thanks to Time-Warner itself, the internet has already been invented, and all the publications that would suffer under this blatant instance of speech suppression by the corporate oligarchy and its bribed lackeys and sycophants in the regulatory agencies will simply continue publishing on the net, and deriving what advertising revenue they can from that source.

But there's no reason why it should go into effect. Visit http://action.freepress.net/campaign/postal today. Sign the letter and e-mail it to your congressperson, to the Postal Board of Governors, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and the Postmaster General. Make noise, raise hell, and don't take "no" for an answer.

It's your country. Take it back.

Old Bessie

George Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the C.I.A." will be released on April 30.

Previews of the book emphasize its revelatory chapters and its provision of further proof (as if we needed any) that the country was deliberately lied into war in 2003. David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who apparently got an advance copy, writes that "George Tenet has been doing a slow burn ever since he left the CIA. He's been angrier and angrier as he saw himself being essentially made the fall guy on WMD in Iraq. And he's gonna come back saying he and his agency, the CIA, were pushed, again and again, by Cheney and Cheney's people to give him the answers that they wanted. And he's got chapter and verse on that."

So, Tenet is pissed about having been a tool.

Nobody made him do it.

Isn't it wonderful that guys like him game the system, climb the ladder to the top of the bureaucracy, dutifully follow orders, do and say what they're told, and then grow consciences after they've retired?

I guess under the rule of a military dictatorship, that's the way it has to be. The decider decides the rules for the wise ones and the fools, and everybody follows orders.

But keep in mind, the U.S. as a military dictatorship didn't start with Bush. He's just the most flagrant and obvious one so far.

The Emperor Lyndon Johnson liked to tell stories. The reporters found him very amusing and entertaining. Here's a story old down-home Lyndon, one of our emperors from 40 years ago, told about the problems of working with the dictator's private army, a.k.a. the C.I.A.

"Let me tell you about these intelligence guys," Johnson said, in his best "just folks" down-home twang. "When I was growing up in Texas we had a cow named Bessie. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it."

Johnson said a mouthful about the U.S. and its foreign policy in modern times with that humble parable. When our leaders regard the truth as the equivalent of shit, it shows how deeply in trouble we are. And we've been in deep trouble for a long time before Bush and Cheney took us over the precipice.

Fast forward to 2003, and Tenet trying to tell Bush and Cheney that the truth is, Saddam is weaponless and defenceless. They tell him to shut up and say what they tell him to say. It'll all be in the book.

And of course, they already knew Saddam was weaponless and defenceless. Cowards and fascist liars like them would never attack someone capable of defending himself.

Freedom from war, freedom from fear, freedom from the insanity of military-industrial imperialism, these are things I've never known in my long life, and never will. But future generations will know them, provided they still have an earth to live on.

(Lyndon Johnson quoted by Chalmers Johnson in his book "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," page 90.)

The Gypsy Fiddler's Song

(A song to be sung without teeth and played without a bow; a movie to be shot with eyes.)

Green leaves are on the trees, green as apples.
Millions of flowers are in the fields.
The dog days are fast approaching;
July is almost upon us.

The tyrant is in the people's palace;
He takes our sons and daughters
And sends them to the faraway desert,
There to leave pieces of themselves --
This one a leg,
This one an arm,
That one a hand and an eye.

Millions of green leaves are on the trees,
July is almost upon us.

Bush the tyrant is taking everything;
He has taken all the money.
He makes us work long overtimes for nothing,
Without even time for a cigarette
Or a slice of pizza.

July is almost upon us;
He has even taken the cool breezes.
In the end he will take even the light.

Millions of green leaves,
People are in the streets
Calling out the name of the criminal.
"Bush, you have ruined our country."

Where are the soldiers?
In front of the people's palace,
Threatening the people with guns and bayonets.
"We're your brothers and sisters," the people say,
"We're your parents, your grandparents,
"Your aunts and uncles -- join us."

The dog days are fast approaching;
July is almost upon us.
In July, the month of revolution, the people say
"The tyrant is finished."

"Come out you coward, and face your judgment."

Millions of green leaves are on the trees,
And in the field, a million flowers.

(Adapted from the Gypsy fiddler's song "Balada Conducatorolui" in "Latcho Drom.")

Speech Suppression, Corporate Monopoly Style

The Postal Regulatory Commission is in the process of setting new periodicals mailing rates that threaten to put many small publications with limited resources out of business.

The new rates will impose a life-threatening strain on political publications of both the left and right, such as The Progressive, In These Times, and The National Review. These are the kinds of political advocacy magazines that target niche readerships and carry limited, inexpensive advertising.

At the same time, the new rates will favor mass-circulation, advertising-heavy magazines such as People and TV Guide.

The Postal Regulatory Commission is adopting the new rate plan at the behest of corporate giant Time-Warner, which is now engaged in a naked attempt to drive smaller competition out of the market and establish a monopoly on information in the U.S., as well as extending its overseas influence.

This was the most important story of the week of April 15-21, but it was buried by the electronic media's monotonic coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

End Run Around the First Amendment

A necessary periodicals postal rate hike has been coming for a long time. But earlier this year, the regulatory commission rejected a proposal from its own U.S. Postal Service which would have imposed an across-the-board rates raise of 11 percent plus change for everybody.

That plan was in keeping with the 215-year history of egalitarian postal rates in this country, envisioned by Madison and Jefferson as a means to promote democracy by encouraging the free flow of information and opinion, even unpopular information and opinion.

But the political appointees of the Bush regime now occupying the Postal Regulatory Commission chose instead to secretly adopt the scheme put forward by Time-Warner, according to University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney, quoted at the conservative website World Net Daily:

"Postal policy converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

"What the Post Office now proposes goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than big magazines– as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent."

What the Postal Regulatory Commission has done, McChesney goes on to explain, is to adopt a rate schedule, secretly, in the dead of night, with no congressional supervision or oversight, giving the best prices to the biggest publishers, allowing them to lock in their market position, eliminate all smaller competition, and cement their monopoly over the information sector.

The new rates will go into effect on July 15 of this year unless this juggernaut is stopped. And it needs to be.

Monopoly Capitalism in One Country, and the Suppression of Speech

The Time-Warner plan is a perfect example of speech suppression and thought control in a sophisticated and seemingly "free and open" society such as the United States. In April of this year, Noam Chomsky wrote of this sort of speech suppression and mind control: "In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe."

It would be "crude and brutal" indeed to simply arrest the publishers and editors of left-wing and right-wing publications and throw them in jail. But the sophisticated technique of hitting them in the wallet, thus eliminating them from marketplace of ideas and leaving room for nothing but conventional thought, is the perfectly tailored technique of our friendly, eminently reasonable, back-slapping and smiling version of the thought police.

This isn't speech suppression, they'll tell you, it's just how the market works. And "the market," as we all know, is a non-ideological, perfectly objective force, which just coincidentally works to eliminate all but the most timid and conventional forms of speech and thought.

Why It's Not Going to Work

In 1520 the Vatican rounded up all the copies of Luther's "95 Theses" they could find and burned them in St. Peter's Square. They thought they had eliminated the heretical threat.

Too bad for them. The printing press had already been invented, and despite the Cardinals' best efforts, the new technology rendered their feeble attempt at old-fashioned speech and thought suppression impotent.

In a similar fashion, even if this disastrous postal rate change goes into effect in July and many smaller publications are put out of business, they won't stop publishing. Largely thanks to Time-Warner itself, the internet has already been invented, and all the publications that would suffer under under this blatant instance of speech suppression by the corporate oligarchy and its bribed lackeys and sycophants in the regulatory agencies will simply continue publishing on the net, and deriving what advertising revenue they can from that source.

But there's no reason why it should go into effect. Visit http://action.freepress.net/campaign/postal today. Sign the letter and e-mail it to your congressperson, to the Postal Board of Governors, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and the Postmaster General. Make noise, raise hell, and don't take "no" for an answer.

It's your country. Take it back.

Numbers

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came out today, and the numbers show that as time goes by more and more Americans are siding with the Democrats and turning away from Bush.

The numbers are astounding. And revealing.

56 Percent now say they want to see a firm date for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. 37 Percent say they're still with Bush. The numbers of Americans who believe victory in Iraq isn't possible is about the same as the number who want a withdrawal date.

The war is probably the biggest cause of the very sour mood in the country, with only 22 percent of Americans saying that the country is on the right track.

While Bush still has his hard-core, never-say-die adherents and echoes who believe every word he says, their numbers continue to shrink. In my 62-year life I've never seen this kind of disaffection and alienation from an American administration.

The depth of anger was somewhat similar under Nixon, but somehow the dissatisfaction didn't go as deep because people tended to think the problem was Nixon, not a systemic dysfunction. I'm not old enough to remember Truman's big slide in the public's estimation. And people's attitude toward Johnson tended to be less intense than their dislike of Bush. Americans didn't start really hating the Vietnam War in large numbers until long after Johnson was gohnson.

Americans now hate the Iraq War and hate Bush, and that's not going to change.

I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody does. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if George W. Bush doesn't finish his second term. Things are beginning to really heat up in the Democratic Congress. I think they're planning to take this administration apart piece by piece.

If that's what they do, it will be fun to watch. My only problem with all this is that it looks like many of us, once again, have been lulled into thinking that things will really change significantly when the Democrats assume full power. I believe we're collectively going to be extremely disappointed.

The Enemy

I visited the website belonging to an American soldier named Pat Dollard, who writes "Eventually, I learned the joys of killing" by way of introduction.

Scrolling down, I read a post by a Corporal Tyler Rock, partially titled "I Got a Message for That Douche Harry Reid." Rock tells us that "ramadi (sic) was once dubbed by everyone as the worst city in the world. but we have done such a great job here that all the families in the area have worked with us on driving out the insurgency and that we work directly with the IA and the IP’s. the city has been cleaned up so well that the IP’s do most of the patrols now and we go out with them to hand out candy and toys to the children."

I'm glad things are so peaceful in Ramadi.

Live blogging NPR...On a violent day in Iraq, House and Sentate negotiators have agreed on a withdrawal date, to be included in a bill President Bush has promised to veto, saying he will not accept a bill containing any "artificial timetable." He does not say whether he would accept a bill containing a natural or an organic timetable.

The timetable for withdrawal is non-binding. That means it's a suggestion, not a requirement. Bush will veto the bill anyway.

Nine members of the 82nd Airborne Division were killed yesterday in a car bomb attack on their base...

"I think the surge has failed," Rep. John Murtha said on CNN today. "I think there was no possibility that it was going to work."

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that in Ramadi yesterday, "Three suicide car bombers killed 20 people and wounded 35 others in the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Ramadi..."

As the day wore on, Harry Reid and Dick Cheney traded insults over the airwaves. Cheney accused Reid and the Democrats of "defeatism." Reid replied, "I'm not going to get into a name-calling contest with somebody who has a nine percent approval rating."

Also today, the premier American Mideast expert, Juan Cole, wrote in the San Jose Mercury News that the anti-American Shi'ite leader Moktada al-Sadr "On Monday...pulled his six Cabinet ministers out of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and on the same day sponsored a demonstration 20,000 strong against a major provincial government. The previous week, he had brought hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into the streets of An-Najaf and other cities to protest Maliki's refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"Can the Maliki government survive the defection of a major Shiite faction?" Cole asks.

Al-Sadr is quickly becoming the most powerful person in Iraq, Cole concludes.

As the war grinds on month after month, news of it begins blur in the mind, like the images seen in a kaleidoscope. Bush, Harry Reid, Moktada al-Sadr, the magnetic "Support Our Troops" ribbons on the backs of Ford Explorers, homicidal uniformed expeditionary cheerleaders for the Party Line on Iraq, the surreal, bulldog face of Cheney, the binding resolutions, the late, Chomsky-reading, two-times martyred football hero Pat Tillman, the non-binding resolutions, the stunned governments, the paralyzed legislatures, all blend together in a macabre spiral, the suicidal tailspin and death rattle of a doomed empire, unable to act to save itself, and heading irretrievably toward the rocks.

Is it possible to identify and point out who, exactly, brought us to this place? We need to find out who the enemy is. As a dispossessed Oklahoma farmer groaned in Grapes of Wrath, "Who are we supposed to shoot?"

Under the "V"

From the website of "Editor and Publisher": "The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called 'Buying the War,' which marks the return of 'Bill Moyers Journal.' E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week."

A couple of commenters on the E&P preview of Moyers's documentary drew the conclusion that the media, especially the electronic media, simply wrote an erroneous "first draft" of history. Such baloney.

If the electronic media are owned by the same corporations that own the warmongers in the White House, should we be surprised that they got together to cook up a batch of lies?

The "press" wasn't writing a "first draft" of anything. Moyers's documentary proves that they were regurgitating the bullshit the regime was feeding them, and they knew exactly what they were doing.

The Moyers expose reveals that of the 414 Iraq stories that ran on NBC, CBS, and ABC news in the six-month runup to the war, nearly all originated in PR handouts from the White House, Pentagon, or State Department.

NBC is owned by General Electric, CBS by Westinghouse Corp., ABC by Disney, and the White House by all of the above. I don't know why anybody is surprised that our corporate masters got their story straight when they needed to light a fire under the public, ever composed mostly of wide-eyed innocents, so as to boil them up into a sustained paroxysm of war fever.

There were a few dissenters. The Knight-Ridder newspaper chain did some commendable, genuinely investigative reporting during late 2002 and early 2003 (and if an independent, free press still exists at all in this country, you'll find it only in the "dead tree" media and on the blogs). NBC fired Phil Donahue after he objected to the network's orders that he couldn't have antiwar people on his show by themselves, and that he was required to have "two conservatives for every liberal." But mostly the corporate media simply did what they were ordered to do.

Welcome to Oceania.

Addressing the topics of mind control in modern societies, Noam Chomsky recently wrote that "In crude and brutal societies," (such as the old Soviet Union or North Korea today) "the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern." But the United States is not a crude and brutal society, and theoretically we enjoy "freedom of speech" and a "free press." Theoretically, we do not experience governmental mind control.

But in fact, we do experience it. The runup to the Iraq War is a perfect example of it. Chomsky explains, "In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe." (Emphasis is mine.)

And who defines this "unstated doctrinal orthodoxy" of which Chomsky speaks? Who "imposes" the limits of acceptable political thought in a "free" society? Who delivers our "Party Line" to us?

Brian Williams does. And Chris Matthews. And Charlie Gibson. And Katie Couric. This is not an idle, reckless, or outlandish accusation I'm making here. If you want proof of what I'm saying, of what Chomsky is saying, Watch the Moyers documentary on Wednesday night and you'll see just how Americans were force fed their Party Line on Iraq.

The Toast of the Beltway

One of the things Alberto Gonzales took a lot of heat for at his Senate hearing yesterday was his willingness to function as Bush's water boy, rather than as an independent and self-sufficient prosecutor. I don't know why the senators felt that way. You don't get mad at a lump of ice for being cold.

If the Shrub were to appoint a truly independent and completely nonpartisan AG, he or she would have plenty to do at home, putting the administration under the anal-o-scope. Enough to keep him or her busy for the next year and 2/3 for sure.

As for yesterday's hearings, I didn't see any of them on the teevee, but I listened to analysis and an hour-long recap on NPR last night, and ended up almost feeling sorry for the little guy. I've sat through a lot of Senate hearings, including most of Watergate, and I've never seen anybody shot at from so many different sides or treated with such undisguised contempt. Ever.

You'd think Gonzales would bail on the job just to escape from the horrible situation he's in. With the grilling he got yesterday, he must have been sitting there shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.

(Cross-posted at the blog Catboxx.blogspot.com.)

New Kid in Town

The Pulitzer Prize for national journalism this year went to a 31-year-old Boston Globe reporter, Charlie Savage, for his 2006 series of articles on presidential signing statements.

Savage's eight detailed articles investigate the extent, the comprehensive scope, and the constitutional meaning of these statements, and how the Bush administration has used them to attempt to erect a dictatorship on the ruins of what used to be a constitutionally-mandated system of checks and balances.

In an article entitled "Cheney Aide is Screening Legislation," Savage describes how "The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power..."

At the Beliefnet.com U.S. politics discussion board, a poster known as Stardove brought up Rep. Dennis Kucinich's intention, revealed in a letter to his House colleagues, to file articles of impeachment against Vice-President Cheney effective immediately.

Savage's Cheney article shows why a Cheney impeachment is neither desirable nor optional, but mandatory if the Constitution still has any meaning and if the government our founders bequeathed to us is still in effect. Cheney took an oath to "uphold, protect, and defend" the Constitution, but he has deliberately and systematically violated that oath by doing everything within his power to subvert and destroy the system of checks and balances the Constitution requires.

Savage describes how Cheney, and his chief of staff David Addington, spend their days poring over the Constitution, thinking up a thousand reasons why it doesn't say what it says, and plotting new ways to increase executive power and establish a military dictatorship so powerful that it can never again be challenged.

In perhaps the most far-reaching article in the series, entitled "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws", Savage quotes David Golove, a New York University law professor who has studied the Bush signing statements, and declares that "to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to 'overturn the existing structures of constitutional law.'"

Golove added later, "Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.'"

Cheney and Bush have thrown down the gauntlet. If Congress doesn't pick it up, we might as well carve the tombstone for our dear, departed republic.

Savage has done a thorough job of dissecting these high crimes, which are a matter of public record and are being committed out in the open, for the world to see.

I was glad to see the Pulitzer go to someone so young. Seymour Hersh turned 70 this year, and while he shows no signs of slowing down or retiring, I've been wondering where the new crop of young journalists who will fill the vacuum created by his eventual departure will come from. I'm sure this series of articles is just the beginning for Charlie Savage.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thank God we still have press freedom in this country. As long as we do, and as long as reporters like Savage continue to appear, there's still hope.

It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Congress will now do what the law requires of them and move forward on the articles of impeachment against Cheney. Over the last 50 years the executive branch, especially when under control of Republicans, has usurped power in many areas the Constitution reserves to the legislature. It hasn't helped that Congress has repeatedly and spinelessly rolled over and handed this power to them. Getting it back won't be easy, but it's undebatably necessary if we're to have a chance of taking our country back.

For 30 Pieces of Silver

The war will continue, because the political power structure is not sufficiently independent to put a stop to it. What we're seeing now is politics as usual, perpetrated by politicians who are owned.

On CBS's "Face the Nation" yesterday, the featured guest, Vice-President Dick Cheney, gloated that Democrats in Congress would "not leave America's fighting forces in harm's way without the resources they need..."

What does Cheney know that we don't? Why is he so confident that the "loyal opposition" is on the verge of caving in?

The problem is the Michigan Democrat and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin. The Israel lobby in the U.S. (AIPAC) has been pressuring Congress to keep the war going, and this guy Levin over the course of his career has gotten more AIPAC money than any other Congressman. (The figures are five years old, but you can see the pattern which continues to this day.)

And now he's more than willing to do AIPAC's bidding. Ray McGovern at Truthout.org has the gruesome details.

We need to forget about the Democrats, now and in 2008. The Democrats are not going to help us. Their paymasters will make sure they continue to ignore the will of the people.

There is no democracy. This is not my country.

I don't need to ask why the Democrats continue to do the wrong thing. I know why. What I really want to know is why we still have any faith left in this dinosaur of a political system. Why aren't we taking to the streets by the millions? Why didn't we shut down this country and its intolerable, world-threatening war machine long ago? How can we be so blind?

If people are united, determined, and motivated, they alone, without any outside help, can take down a government and a ruling class, and they can do so without resorting to violence. Look at what happened in Russia and the other Eastern Bloc countries in the late eighties, and in India in the late forties.

We need to awaken from our sweet dreams of democracy, and of Liberty and Justice for all, and get re-acquainted with the real thing.

As for me, I'm through with voting. From now on I'll vote with my feet.

We the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1789, "Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."

Jefferson neglected to say what happens when the people are uninformed, or misinformed. That requires a modern observer, like Seymour Hersh.

Early this month, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi interviewed Hersh and asked him "Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this (Iraq) war from starting?"

"You mean learn from the past?," Hersh immediately replied. "America? No. We made the same dumb mistake," then added, "On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years."

The Landscape

How easy is it for people like Cheney and Karl Rove to "hide stuff" from American voters? That depends on which voters we're talking about, and the first thing an investigator finds out in examining the American electorate is that it's hard to generalize.

Listening to the results of a Pew Research Council survey on NPR this afternoon, I learned that 25 percent of American adults can't correctly name the vice-president of the U.S. In describing a level of public ignorance that would have given Jefferson shingles, the Council spokesman added, as a sort of consolation, that "there are a few people who are very well informed."

Looking at the political orientations of both the informed and the ignorant, what we find is a rapidly shifting landscape, in flux due to America's disastrous loss in the Iraq War, and moving even more rapidly leftward since the Hurricane Katrina disaster of last October. Democrats now outnumber Republicans decisively, and as nearly as can be gauged, about 20 percent of American voters are more or less progressive in their orientation. There remains a hard core of Republican Party and ideological party-line voters numbering roughly a third of the electorate.

The biggest problem I see with American voters, however, is their across-the-board ignorance of history. The news junkies are frequently as uninformed on questions of history or the Constitution as the duncified one-quarter who don't know who Cheny is, and the disasters of the last six years could easily recur if we don't collectively get a little more historically knowledgeable.

There are some signs that this is improving. Just before he died, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote that "Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future." (Quoted by Lewis Lapham in the May, 2007 issue of Harper's.)

It was our almost total absence of historical perspective that kept running through my mind as I witnessed the televised beginning of the Iraq War unfold in those critical days of mid-March, 2003. My memory rocketed back and forth between 2003 and 1964, when I watched the Gulf of Tonkin scam, titled "Aggression From the North" on one of the very last Hearst Corporation theater newsreels ever produced, and recognized at the time how easily the American public was manipulated by government propaganda. In 2003, considering I had lived through essentially the same scenario once before, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. "These morons are being done exactly the same way they were before," I kept saying to myself. "Can't they remember anything?"

Of course we can't. Half of us weren't even born in 1964, and most of the other half has completely forgotten it.

"So it goes," as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying. Maybe next time.

The Well-Informed Revolutionary

Besides having a lot to say about the necessity of a well-informed citizenry to the survival of democracy, Jefferson was adamant about the need for periodic revolution. "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion?" he asked in 1787. "And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

If, as the late Professor Schlesinger believed, Americans are beginning to alter their habits of material indolence and historical ignorance, the results might very well spell trouble for the powers that be. At this point in our history, an informed public is inevitably going to be an angry public, and it cannot avoid asking the following questions:

*What do we mean by this term "government." Is there an oligarchy in this country composed of members of interlocking boards of directors of gigantic corporations, which is part of the government, or maybe even the government? And if so, who elected them?

*How many of these giant corporations are heavily invested in and dependent on a gargantuan war machine, whose existence endangers the country, is hostile to democracy, and which sucks up one of every two American tax dollars?

*What are the implications of the fact that all the major television news networks are owned by giant corporations? How does this affect the integrity of most of the information most Americans receive about their country and world beyond every day?

*From where do the candidates of both major parties receive the bulk of their funding?

Answer these questions honestly, and the answers will inescapably lead you to one final question: What good is an election if it doesn't give you an opportunity to overthrow the government?

礼儀 (Courtesy)

Usually when I visit San Francisco I'm traveling from my little home on the outskirts of Desert Hot Springs, and the city seems oversized, crowded, noisy, and rushed.

But the last time I was there I flew in from Tokyo, and in comparison to that compressed megalopolis of 11 million, SFO seemed laid back, slow, sparsely populated, and lazy. However, after just a week in Japan, there was one aspect of life on the American street that was shocking, i.e., our native rudeness and vulgarity. I hadn't heard people cursing or shouting in public, or yelling angrily into their cell phones for just long enough to be taken aback.

No self-respecting Japanese would ever act that way. Ever. And it's not because there are laws forbidding rudeness or overt public hostility in Japan. People there, unfailingly polite, careful, and reserved, are simply following what sociologists call norms, or mores. We should be so lucky.

There was another homecoming surprise, and that was witnessing the precipitous fall of Don Imus, impaled on the barb of his own rude and insulting tongue, of all things. I found the scenario puzzling, considering that Imus's stock in trade for years has been the insult, the sneer, the slur, and the shameless butt kiss (see the post of 4/11 below). It's not as if "nappy-headed hos" was a sudden, unexpected descent into show-off vulgarity. Besides, that kind of talk is ubiquitous on the airwaves now, and there are lots worse hate-speech slingers than Imus all over talk radio, 24/7.

So what happened? Did Imus's last slur signal some kind of tipping point? Are we finally, as a people, going to pull up short, take a look at what we've become, and sprout a renewed sense of shame?

There are some who are calling for a new package of hate-speech laws, hoping we can legislate ourselves into a more civil condition. It's a terrible idea, and a quick re-reading of the First Amendment should put it to rest. Don Imus has the legal right to say anything he wants, as does the guy on the street corner hollering "Fuck you, bitch," into his cellphone. The question is, do they have a sufficient sense of shame and decorum to restrain themselves? And we need to ask ourselves collectively, do we have enough self-respect to act like human beings instead of like a pack of mad dogs?

Others contend that this issue isn't important. They're wrong. The tone of our public and private discourse is our social atmosphere, like the water a fish swims in. It determines not just how we speak to one another, but heavily influences the content of what we say. And what I hear in our everyday speech isn't just rudeness, but also hostility and aggression. It says a lot about Americans' attitudes toward themselves, each other, and the world.

There are several signs in the air that America has reached a cultural turning point, and that we may be ready to begin the long, slow road back toward an ideal of public integrity, which would involve abjuring vulgarity and frivolity. In addition, Lewis Lapham, in the latest issue of Harper's, quotes the late Arthur Schlesinger, who weeks before his death in February wrote that "Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people." But that should be another topic, for another time.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut has passed away. He was 84.

For a while Vonnegut was thinking about suing Philip Morris, because he always expected the unfiltered Pall Malls he smoked to kill him years ago, but they didn't. Instead he died from brain injuries he sustained after a recent fall at home.

He was a witness to the firebombing of Dresden, and wrote it up in "Slaughterhouse-Five." That event was the beginning of both this country's descent into habitual immorality and hypocrisy and Vonnegut's sharp condemnation of those things.

He retired from writing years ago, but reappeared in 2005 with a short, non-fiction rant, "A Man Without a Country." From page 87:

"In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were.

"And with good reason.

"In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

"Piece of cake.

"In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanized our own soldiers, not because of their religon or race but because of their low social class.

"Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

"Piece of cake.

"The O'Reilly Factor.

"So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

"Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there."

Vonnegut was a person you didn't want to lie to. He'd call you on it every time.

Anus in the Morning

So Don Imus has been dropped by MSNBC. He'll continue on the radio for a while, but I'll bet this is the end of him, or at least the beginning of a fairly steep decline into oblivion.

Hardly surprising, but then my only question is what took MSNBC so long?

I genuinely don't understand why this is happening now. As a long-time insomniac, I can testify that the kind of talk that finally roused the wrath of the network has been a regular staple of Anus in the Morning literally for years.

By regular I mean every day, every hour. That neo-Nazi producer and engineer Bernard McGuirk has been the chief perp, constantly calling people niggers and faggots and pussies and dykes, and doing a racist and homophobic imitation of an Irish archbishop that's just one long slur. Imus makes a show of pretending to disapprove of McGuirk at times. Other times he just joins right in.

Personally, I liked seeing it. I'm in favor of people showing their true colors. If I hate somebody's guts, I want to be able to clearly explain, to myself and others, why I feel that way, and be able to use concrete examples of specific misbehavior as evidence.

There are lots of Americans like Bernard McGuirk and Imus. Don't kid yourself.

View From the Peak

Dave B. here, and yeah, I know it's been a while. I decided I needed to lie low until after DNA testing established the paternity of Anna Nicole's baby's father, just in case. So I've been traveling incognito through the Orient with a ruby in my burnoose these past couple weeks. You can't be too careful these days.

But to return to weightier subjects, I consulted our old friend James Kunstler at his weekly blog Clusterfuck Nation this morning for my weekly ration of cheer re: our rapidly approaching energy catastrophe. Jim didn't disappoint, and his graceful, if not delicate stiletto dissection of the Department of Energy's fantasy-driven, rosy and sanguine views of our immediate and long-term future should be required reading.

After establishing that the EIA (Energy Information Agency) does at least attribute the current price run-up to both import and refinery production shortages, Kunstler points out the reasons for the contrast between the agency's reality-based analysis of our current predicament and its ludicrous view of our prospects:

"The EIA has to be more reality-based about current activity than their future projections, because the current import-export and refinery figures are out there for other people and other data-gathering organizations to see. The EIA's future projections are a joke. They are based on the fantasy that everything will be okay despite what we see happening now. The EIA projects that all the world's oil producers will increase their oil production hugely by 2030. They see Saudi Arabia shooting up to 17.1 million barrels a day when, in fact, Saudi production fell 7 percent just over the past year alone to 8.4 mm/b/d. They see Mexico shooting way up, despite the announcement last year by Pemex that the Cantarell field (60 percent of Mexico's total production) is crashing at a minimum rate of 15 percent a year. They see Russia zooming way up, despite the fact that Russia is probably past the 70 percent mark of its original total reserves. If you go to this EIA chart (pdf), you'll see practically everybody's production shooting way up in the decades ahead, even the US, which, in reality, has seen nothing but steady annual decline for more than thirty years (we produce half now of what we did in 1970)."

While he doesn't explain what the payoff is, i.e., what material or psychological benefits we derive out of refusing to deal with undeniable facts, Kunstler consludes that "The EIA is a perfect reflection of the public it serves. It appears to conduct daily business in a responsible way while it resolutely refuses to face the obvious realities of the future."

It's only fair to point out that some disagree with Kunstler's conclusions, primarily lunatics and economists. They'll point out that there's plenty of oil left -- approximately half the three trillion barrels of light, sweet crude we started with, plus the huge, unexploited reserves of heavy oils -- tar sands, asphalts, and shales. They usually fail to mention that getting that stuff on line as gasoline is going to be difficult and expensive, and that the problem is not that we're running out of oil, but running out of cheap oil.

The indisputable facts are that Californians are looking at gas prices close to four dollars a gallon before the end of summer. And that's only the beginning.

But in the long run, the approaching disaster is a good thing. I suppose we could find a way to mine and refine the Alberta tar sands, and the Orinoco asphalt deposits, and the Colorado oil shales, and turn them into gasoline. It's just a matter of money. But we really don't want to do that, for what should be obvious reasons. Just watch Al Gore's movie, or read goldfrog's global warming posts at the Los Angeles Free Press blog, and you'll see why the view from the peak isn't all gloom and doom, and why what bodes ill for the motoring hordes of Southern California, now trapped on a freeway from which there is no escape, is good news for Mother Earth.